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Saving Lives And The Environment

Grind for October 12th, 2018FIRST SIP:“Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”
– Thomas Jefferson

End Of The Line

The Headline

UN says we have 12 years left to stop global warming

The Grind

According to a report released this week by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have just 12 years to stop the effects of global warming.

Failure to act will result in catastrophic changes such as:

– The destruction of coral reefs

– Rising sea levels

– Widespread death of fish

– Extreme heat

– Severe storms

To prevent such effects, the global community would need to become completely carbon-neutral by 2050.

The Implication

The UN report brings to mind Al Gore’s famous documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” in which he claimed the ice caps would be completely melted by 2014. In September, Gore falsely claimed Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut were related to global warming.

Gore says the new UN report will “encourage the development of new technologies,” adding that “time is running out, so we must capitalize and build on the solutions available today.”

The report is “super-sobering,” says Amy Snover, director of the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group. “It’s super-frightening and serious, and it really emphasizes what in general I think we have all been thinking for quite some time, which is that this is a really serious deal.”

The problem here is that the media (and its readers) have heard these threats before. We keep getting new deadlines and people are no longer taking global warming seriously.

In addition, there is a vocal group of scientists that believe carbon dioxide is not linked to climate change and that we are moving towards a mini ice age.

Trending

The Headline

FBI Director: Social media is making terrorism worse

The Grind

“Terrorism today moves at the speed of social media,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray during an interview with CBS. “The part of it is engaging with social media companies in a way to try to get them to do certain things they can do voluntarily.”

In order to stop terrorist attacks in the digital era, the FBI must rely on cooperation from tech companies.

“We’re getting much better cooperation than we used to…I think there’s a view that this is a shared threat,” continued Wray. “We all have kids. We all have family members. We all have potential victims.”

The bureau has stopped a number of attacks recently – including one aimed at a Miami mall, another aimed at the San Francisco pier, and two more that targeted Independence Day celebrations in Minnesota and Cleveland.

“Today’s terrorist threat still includes sleep cells – Al Qaeda – all the kind of major terrorist organizations that you would think of,” said Wray. “But we’re also very focused now on homegrown violent extremists, which are people who are largely here already, in the US.”

These people are typically radicalized through social media.

GOOD TO THE LAST DROP:Did you know… Cast iron skillets used to be the leading source of iron in the American diet!